Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station on Facebook is a frequent read of mine. I have moved his notifications to view first in the Facebook interface. Why? Because he makes me laugh, and I need a good laugh these days. Today was no exception:
Once upon a time an address book was a simple list of names and phone numbers that you scribbled onto little squares of cardboard and put in a little indexed box and kept by the phone — which was a big black plastic box with a dial and a handset, attached to the wall via wires, and heavy enough to bludgeon somebody to death with.
Back then, how many people did you really need to call? A few dozen maybe. Relatives. Friends. Anybody else was listed in the phone book.
My mom still has such a box full of cards next to her phone in the dining room. I knock it over nearly every time I’m there. Damned cards, why do you still have this mess? I ask as I’m picking them up off the floor. Why?
See, with the invention of computers, an address book became something you laboriously copied from those little cardboard rectangles into electronic storage. In fact some of the earliest programs for home computers (remember when we called them “home” computers?) were address books and contact lists. Periodically something would happen, a crash, an upgrade, something, and you’d have to retype the whole damned list into a different machine. So you hung onto that little box of cardboard rectangles, the ultimate backup.
Stonekettle
This image is representative of the first smartphone. A device which was available long before Saint Jobs invented the iPhone. It had a music player before there was a iPod, too. I graduated from the Handspring Visor in the center to the Treo on the left, a device that was also available before the iPhone. It was cheaper, too.
I haven’t used a Rolodex (the little squares of paper) ever in my life. Other people kept Rolodexes which I transferred once to my daily planner (a 5 ring planner with transplantable address pages) and then transferred them one more to my Handspring (Palm) device. Every transfer after that has been electronic. To quote Egon “print is dead”.
I have never attempted to recreate my list of contacts because (and this is important) I never wrote anything down that I didn’t have to and I never kept things I wrote out of embarrassment at my poor handwriting (more on that here) consequently my address book exists in a few digital places and pretty much nowhere else and the sad part is I can’t think of anyone’s number aside from The Wife, the city emergency number and information number.
Or maybe it isn’t sad. There are a whole host of things that people remember for no good reason other than their lives require them to remember them. The Wife is my link to sanity and the rest of the world, so her number I really do need to know. Everyone else is findable through lookup or the eight or so social platforms that I would utilize if I wanted to talk to someone. I would use them because who calls anybody anymore? I don’t even talk to people I pay bills to unless I absolutely have to. The phone is as dead as print is, for all intents and purposes.
However, I may have run across the problem Jim is talking about. Android creates a phone-only contact that is your contact information, and it will delete your contact of the same name from the gmail interface. It will do this pretty consistently no matter how many times you create that card. I know this because I used to beam my contact information to others with Palm devices, which meant I had to keep a digital card of my information to beam. If there had been more Palm users this may have been more useful back then, but it is the reason I still have a card of my information today. Or had until Android removed it from my contacts list when I moved to Android and identified the phone user as the same name on the card. Android is probably trying to be helpful and is only helping me to discover more colorful forms of cursing in the process.
I have referred to my handheld device as “my brain” for years now. If it doesn’t get written in this thing, I won’t remember it. This has only gotten more true as the disease progresses.
